Last weekend was the last moment of summer when the sun brought back 28 degrees in time for a Sunday of lovers.

Even though I have lived in Montreal for over four years now, I have never taken J to Parc La Fontaine. Time sinks between us and so it has taken this long.

Last weekend despite my deadlines, I insisted we pack a tote of snacks (which was not enough and I nearly fainted) and go before it is too cold and too uncomfortable for me to take strolls around the city. J wanted to relax in the sun while I insisted on photos at every turn. Not that taking photos is a new phenomenon, but I am obsessed with the visual culture of my pregnancy knowing that everything changes from one day to the next, changes in visible ways, in ways that my day to day never considered before. And so my solipsistic exhaustion endures. Although is it solipsistic if I’m now of two? Is my body now living two durational instants? There is the time of the baby, the time of me, and I guess also the time of us together—and the visual representation of not two, but three, durations? The holding still of these moments.

I read that having a child changes your conception of time and your drive to get shit done. For now, I want to hold onto all the durational instants of my pregnancy, even the uncertainties that come with pain. I want to move through all the Bergsonian philosophy of matter and memory as I live the Kristevian chora.

I am 26 weeks today. I was 25 weeks when those photos above were taken. I am a week away from the third trimester. The third trimester is your final trimester; it is the time to prepare for the birth of the matter that is making sense of itself inside of you. I can feel the third trimester coming, the joy and love of my body is shifting to make sense of sleepless nights and pains and gains I haven’t had yet—pains that wake me up at night, pains that wonder where my organs have gone, a scale that reads well above the “appropriate” weight gain for this time, pains that force me to take time. Time. How quantified is my pregnant body by the medical system, by the history of modern child birth? From the “you might miscarry at any turn” time of keeping pregnancy a secret in the first trimester, to the time of joy and energy in your second, to the painful and enduring time of the third? How convenient. How normative. How explicit with anticipation of how our body is supposed to respond to prescriptive time. Considering I almost exclusively refer to myself as the amount of weeks pregnant I am, it would be disingenuous to suggest I’m not part of that quantified discourse too, despite the ambivalent efforts to distance myself from it.